“This was a beautiful one, but less violent than those of 15 November 2011 and 5 January 2012; however it lasted quite a bit longer – a good 5.5 hours, if we count the hours of true lava fountaining. Absolutely magnificent due to the nearly full moon casting light on the snow-covered mountain and on the gigantic plume that rose into the nearly completely windstill night. It lasted into daybreak and had a breathtaking Grand Finale, with huge magma bubbles exploding and loud detonations that continued until about 09 h GMT. This time there were only two vents active within the crater, the fissures on the southeast and north flanks of the New Southeast Crater cone did not show any activity. There were no pyroclastic flows, and overall this paroxysm had something less “edgy” to it – all went in a more gradual manner, no abrupt start and stop of lava fountaining.

The lava flow followed the same path and was about as long as the one of 5 January, some 2 km, stopping before reaching the floor of the Valle del Bove.”

Eruptions readers did an excellent job of capturing the action via the many webcams – you should definitely check out the comments section of yesterday’s post to see all their images (see below), animated GIFs, comments and observations of the eruption as it happened. As I’ve mentioned before, this strikes me as an excellent way to collect images and data of eruptions as they happen if a volcano observatory somewhere decided to crowdsource this sort of information collection.

Webcam capture of the early stages of Etna's eruption on February 8-9, 2012. Image by Eruptions reader Kirby.